Contemporary civil rights organizations that support race conscious policies in contradiction to Martin Luther King’s emphasis on equality and character get a free pass from the New York Times, which repeats and recycles unfounded accusations aimed against Tea Party participants and Glenn Beck of Fox News. In many respects, the small government activists who took part in Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally are more in step with MLK’s convictions than their critics. It is the ideals of the founding period that make liberty possible. Not outdated, collapsing entitlements.

False allegations of racism aimed against Tea Party activists who favor constitutional restraints on federal power predictably resurfaced in a New York Times report that sought to discredit Glenn Beck’s Washington D.C. rally. Reporter Kate Zernike has a long history of invoking race as a way to discredit and marginalize Tea Party activism.

As TimesCheck has previously noted, there is a concerted effort in the news media to interlink small government activists with radical elements. “They tend to be white and male, with a disproportionate number above 45, and above 65,” Zernike laments in an earlier report. Their memories are of a different time, when the country was less diverse.”

The data does not substantiate the allegations. Even the New York Times/CBS poll, which typically oversamples Democrats, concluded Tea Party activists were sophisticated and well-educated. There’s also a Washington Post/ABC Poll that shows 20 percent of voters concur with the Tea Party’s economic concerns; that’s hardly suggestive of an irrelevant, radical fringe.

Glenn Beck, the Fox News conservative broadcaster who joined forces with the Tea Party in Washington D.C., has been accused by some of dishonoring the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. Beck’s rally at the Lincoln Memorial took place on the 47^th anniversary of King’s civil rights speech.

Zernike opens her “Political Memo” by citing unnamed critics who have made claims of racial insensitivity.

“It seems the ultimate thumb in the eye: that Glenn Beck would summon the Tea Party faithful to a rally on the anniversary of the March on Washington, and address them from the very place where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech 47 years ago,” the report says. “After all, the Tea Party and its critics have been facing off for months over accusations of racism.”

The overarching purpose of the rally was to help reclaim the ideals civil rights movement from corrupt political elements that have a separate agenda, Beck explained in an interview with Chris Wallace, host of Fox News Sunday.

On his radio program, Beck has argued that many of the key points King made in his “I Have a Dream” Speech have been lost. Organizations like the National Association of Advancement for Colored People (NAACP) and the Congressional Black Caucus are off the mark in the criticisms and have lost sight of long-standing principles, Tea Party leaders have suggested.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” King declared.

In her article, Zernike quotes from portions of Beck’s radio program that she later seeks to discredit and dismiss.

“We are the people of the civil rights movement,” Beck is quoted as saying. “We are the ones that must stand for civil and equal rights, justice, equal justice. Not special justice, not social justice.”

While it’s perfectly appropriate to question and analyze Beck’s commentary, the report proceeds to give critics a free pass. If Beck is so far off the mark, then why are self-described civil rights organizations like the NAACP pushing race based affirmative programs that discriminate on the basis of skin color?

Although the liberal news media has thus far failed to provide any concrete, tangible evidence of coordinated racism within Tea Party events, Zernike implies that these elements will be uncovered and exposed in due time.

“It has become an article of faith among Tea Party groups that any racist signs at rallies – `Go Back to Kenya’ directed at President Obama, is just one example – are carried by Democratic plants sent to make the Tea Party look bad,” she wrote.

For that matter, it is an “article of faith” among liberal media elites that the  best way to silence and shut down libertarian movements is to equate federalism and constitutionalism with racism.

Consider the following:

“In the Tea Party’s talk of states’ rights, critics say they hear an echo of slavery, Jim Crow and George Wallace. Tea Party activists call that ridiculous: they do not want to take the country back to the discrimination of the past, they say, they just want the states to be able to block the federal mandate on health insurance.”

She doesn’t stop there:

“Still, the government programs that many Tea Party supporters call unconstitutional are the ones that have helped many black people emerge from poverty and discrimination,” the report continues. “It is not just that Rand Paul, the Republican nominee for Senate in Kentucky, said that he disagreed on principle with the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that required business owners to serve blacks. It is that many Tea Party activists believe that laws establishing a minimum wage or the federal safety net are an improper expansion of federal power.”

All very debatable propositions.

There’s a considerable amount of scholarship that shows how government programs have actually perpetuated dependency and poverty. The point about the minimum wage is equally problematic. Younger Americans just entering the workforce, be they black or white, tend to suffer the most when federal officials coerce higher wages.

An argument can be made that Tea Party activists are much closer in mind and spirit to the sentiments expressed by Dr. King than the contemporary civil rights establishment.

“In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” he said in his speech. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked `insufficient funds.’ But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation…”

Unlike their liberal media critics, Tea Party activists understand that it is the ideals of the founding period and the constitutional order that helped make liberty possible in the first place; not bankrupt government programs.

In anticipation of major court cases that could cut against the Obama Administration, the NYT has been targeting Chief Justice John Roberts and other right leaning members. However, its editorial in defense of First Amendment freedoms rightly credits the Chief Justice checking congressional excesses and deserves special praise…

Just a few days after a running a front page piece that essentially fixed a bull’s-eye around Chief Justice John Roberts and other more conservative members of the U.S. Supreme Court, The New York Times has followed up with an editorial about first amendment jurisprudence that deserves praise and recognition. At issue, is a high court ruling against a congressional law that bans depictions of animal cruelty.

Although the House has introduced a modified version of the legislation, the editorial argues that federal lawmakers have not yet grasped the constitutional points Roberts has made. As repulsive as the images are, it is not permissible for congress to create a new list of First Amendment exceptions.

“Justice Roberts said the court cannot create a new exception to free speech by simply balancing the value of the speech against its harm to society,” the editorial points out. “The First Amendment `reflects a judgment by the American people that the benefits of its restrictions on the Government outweigh the costs,’ Roberts wrote. `Our Constitution forecloses any attempt to revise that judgment simply on the basis that some speech is not worth it.’ Almost no one would say depictions of animals being crushed or mutilated are worthwhile. The concept is so repulsive that animal rights advocates persuaded a very busy House to pass a new bill outlawing them.”

Animal cruelty does not fit the strict the strict definition of obscenity as it applies to U.S., the editorial explains. “A better analogy would have been to child pornography, in which the act of taking pictures of children is itself illegal,” the Times says. “But Justice Roberts said animal cruelty is not in that category either. The First Amendment is a remarkably fragile institution that does not need more exceptions carved from its meaning.”

Freedom is sometimes a hard item to live with and accept. American citizens from across the political spectrum and from a variety of different religious faiths must sometimes absorb material that offends their sense of decency. The NYT is spot on here with an editorial that strikes all the right notes

Sen. Carl Levin is using phony small business advocates to push for double taxation on U.S. businesses that profit overseas. Even the NYT is forced to concede that the activity is “unusual,” but declines to do any serious investigation. The organizations in question all have far left affiliations suggestive of a big government agenda. That much is evident from just cursory glance of web sites…

Small business groups have joined forces with Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) to block offshore tax havens for large companies and wealthy Americans that come at the expense of job producing enterprises, according to The New York Times.  Or have they?

Although Sen. Levin has never been a friend of the free market system in the past, he has suddenly developed a concern for law abiding business owners who lose out when more sizable corporate operations exploit tax shelters, a July report informs readers.

Three non-profit organizations — the American Sustainable Business Council, Business for Shared Prosperity and Wealth for the Common Good — are indentified as the primary authors of a 25 page report that calls out multinational companies for avoiding $37 billion in federal taxes; an estimate that is probably on the low end.

“The campaign is unusual because it is the first time that small businesses have organized to combat offshore tax avoidance and evasion in a significant way,” The Times observes. But instead of investigating the coalition’s self-proclaimed business concerns, the Gray Lady blithely invokes the report’s major recommendations, which are not reflective of free market values.

The operative word here is not “unusual” but duplicitous. All three non-profit groups have tangible links with far left activists who favor greater government control of the private sector, according to new research published by Americans for Limited Government. This places the coalition’s partnership with Sen. Levin into a logical and understandable context that would better serve readers.

Unfortunately, the NYT remains more committed to its big government agenda than it does to straight reporting. Here are some hard facts that should be included in subsequent reports about the coalition and its key players.

Holly Sklar is currently the director of Business for Shared Prosperity. She has served as senior policy adviser for the Let Justice Roll Living Wage Campaign and as an affiliate staff member for Demos, a think tank allied with ACORN and the Institute for Policy Studies. Chuck Collins, who co-founded Wealth for the Common Good has served as an affiliate staffer of Demos and as the Tax Program Director of Business for Shared Prosperity. He is also a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and directs IPS’s Program on Inequality and the Common Good.

The other lead author here, the American Sustainable Business Council, makes no attempt to camouflage its progressive leanings. Its home page includes a long and copious list of allied organizations that advocate for left wing causes. Key personnel include Atlee McFellin, who works as a strategy consultant. McFellin was previously a member of Students for a Democratic Society and the Radical Student Union.

The website for Business and Investors Against Tax Haven Abuse also opens the way for an informative investigation. It contains a list of 25 businesspersons who signed the petition oppose the use of tax havens. An examination of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) records shows that most of the campaign contributions from these same individuals went to Democratic organizations and liberal activist groups.

Why is this not considered news?

The concluding paragraph from the NYT lists some of the major recommendations included in the report that is aimed against larger companies. They are as follows:

“The report calls for laws that would block transfers of intellectual property designed to evade taxes; ban shell corporations that earn profits offshore, even when a corporation’s management team is based in the United States; repeal a rule that allows American corporations to reduce or eliminate their United States tax bills if 80 percent of their business takes place overseas; and set penalties for government contractors that use tax havens.”

Those are not immodest proposals.

The NYT piece suggests any additional tax revenue collected could be used to boost small business. In reality, the anti-profit, anti-capitalist mentality animating this non-profit coalition suggests otherwise.

Thanks  in no small part to President George W. Bush’s successful nominations, the U.S. Supreme Court is perhaps the most conservative in history a front page report in The New York Times declares. In reality, this claim is greatly overstated despite recent rulings. The key swing vote is highly unpredictable and quite left-leaning. Moreover, the more conservative members could retire in short order opening the way for another Obama pick…

Although the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has issued recent rulings that are reflective of a conservative jurisprudence, a front page report running in Sunday’s edition of The New York Times greatly overstates the rightward shift. The article is built around a database created by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that gauges the ideological complexion of court rulings and the leanings of individual members.

“In the database, votes favoring criminal defendants, unions, people claiming discrimination or violation of their civil rights are, for instance, said to be liberal,” the report explains. “Decisions striking down economic regulations and favoring prosecutors, employers and the government are said to be conservative.”

Over next few months, the high court could find itself positioned to rule against the Obama Administration on major public policy fronts. This might explain why the president himself sought to de-legitimize the more conservative members of the bench during his January State of the Union Address.

With eye toward upcoming court cases that could jeopardize liberal preferences, Adam Liptak has crafted a well-written, engaging report that compares and contrasts the record of recently appointed justices with their immediate predecessors. It also examines some of the more monumental cases within their larger historical context. However, some key points do go overlooked.

While the article suggests the court could be entering a new era of stability in light of new appointees, some of the more conservative members who are in their 70s could step down in short order. If Obama selects just one replacement that would dramatically shift the court’s makeup.

Moreover, it is misleading to conflate decisions that overrule precedent with some form of activism. Contrary to what is often taught in law schools, the U.S. Constitution and U.S. constitutional law are often two very different items. Recent court rulings that overturn earlier decisions divorced from the text’s original meaning are more about restoration and less about activism. Associate Justice Clarence Thomas issued a concurring opinion in the McDonald V. Chicago case that is highly instructive here. The Times, like many media outlets, has a distorted view of what activism really means.

“The Roberts court is finding laws unconstitutional and reversing precedent — two measures of activism — no more often than earlier courts,” the report says. But the ideological direction of the court’s activism has undergone a marked change toward conservative results.”

Unfortunately, this assessment omits any consideration of judicial reasoning. As the Times acknowledges, the Roberts Court has actually been quite restrained in its approach toward precedent by historical standard. Although liberal sensibilities may be offended by court rulings that reverse precedent, the majority of justices have argued on the basis of law not ideology.

But the article does call attention to the single most important change on the court concerning the replacement President Bush selected for Sandra Day O’Connor.

“Though Chief Justice Roberts gets all the attention, Justice [Samuel] Alito may thus be the lasting triumph of the administration of President George W. Bush,” the reporter correctly points out. “He thrust Justice Kennedy to the court’s center and has reshaped the future of American law.”

It is easy to forget that Justice Alito was Mr. Bush’s second choice,” the report continues. “Had his first nominee, the apparently less conservative Harriet E. Miers, not withdrawn after a rebellion from Mr. Bush’s conservative base, the nature of the Roberts court might have been entirely different. By the end of her almost quarter-century on the court, Justice O’Connor was without question the justice who controlled the result in ideologically divided cases.”

Since joining the court, Alito has voted decisively in cases involving race preferences and campaign finance reform that stand in stark contrast to Justice O’Connor’s earlier rulings. There’s no question that Alito will remain force on the court for years to come. However, Liptak places far too much weight and faith in the idea of Justice Anthony Kennedy as a reliable vote on behalf of constitutionalism. He is best described as a libertarian legislator who has racked up a multitude of activist rulings.

Kennedy has staked key votes on abortion (Planned Parenthood v. Casey), gay rights (Romer v. Evans and Lawrence v. Texas), the Establishment Clause (Lee v. Weisman), capital punishment (Roper v. Simmons, Kennedy v. Louisiana) and national security (Boumediene v. Bush, Hamdan) that should give strict constructionists good reason for pause. He also joined with Justice O’Connor in the past citing foreign law as the basis for certain rulings.

Anytime a report makes smart use of data and carefully constructed definitions  it should be taken seriously. This article certainly makes the cut. But readers could just as easily conclude that the Roberts Court is actually more center-left than it is right. The public after all is much more right-leaning than the news media.

High unemployment usually means bad news for the political party in power, right? But that’s wrong according according a front page story that works overtime to sell the readers on the idea that Democrats could do well in key states on the basis of data supplied to the newspaper by Moody’s Analytics.

Polls show that House and Senate Democrats are in trouble and could face losses that well exceed the historical average in November’s mid-term elections. But it is apparent from today’s front page report that the New York Times will make every effort to salvage incumbent Democrats who favor their big government agenda.

Oddly enough, the reporter even acknowledges that the article is rooted more in wishful thinking than it is in any hard data.

“Political analysts expect Republicans to make gains — possibly significant ones — in Congress in November, threatening to retake the House and maybe even the Senate,” The Times concedes. “But digging deeper, beyond the national numbers, reveals at least a few glimmers of hope for Democrats — still fairly distant and faint, but bright enough to get campaign strategists scanning the horizon and weighing the odds.”

The central argument here is built around job prospects in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York where Democrats are vulnerable in normally safe seats. Apparently, manufacturing is on the upswing in all three states and job are beginning to come back. Remarkably, The Times also claims high unemployment numbers do not necessarily connect with political contests.

“While much attention has been paid to the nation’s stubbornly high unemployment rate, political scientists have found little correlation between that measure and midterm elections results. Instead, they have found more broad-based indicators, particularly real personal disposable per capita income, which measures the amount of money a household has after taxes and inflation, to be better gauges,” The Times claims.

But unemployment was a key ingredient of the so-called “misery index” that the liberal media often applied against Republican candidates throughout the 1970s and early 1980s before the economy turned upward under President Reagan.

That’s what you call spin and there’s more.

Moody’s Analytics examined some of the House and Senate seats for the NYT that offered up “some surprising bits of encouragement for Democrats but also adds color to the overall daunting picture confronting the party. At the very least, any such signs of hope are certain to affect the strategies being worked out now in campaigns,” according to the report.

But there is very little in the way of specificity once the article moves on from Pa., N.Y. and Ohio. The piece is mostly speculative and more suitable for the blogosphere than it is for the news section of the front page. Readers are told that The Times has identified 114 House seats and 17 Senate seats as being particularly competitive come November. Significant Republican gains could potentially set back the agenda the NYT favors on its editorial pages. Just recently, The Times complained ObamaCare regulations did not go far enough.

Here are some hard numbers included in the Wall Street Journal/NBC news poll that show Democrats are back on their heels even if the public is not in love with GOP.

The number of people who say the country is headed in the wrong direction is 62 percent with 50 percent expressing disapproval over President Obama’s handling of the economy. Moreover, the administration’s mishandling of the BP oil spill has also factored into the equation with about 50 percent expressing disapproval over Obama’s lethargic response.

But the most telling numbers relate to Congress.

When prospective voters were asked to weigh in on their party preference, 45 percent of those surveyed say they want Congress to be controlled by Republicans, while 43 percent want Democrats in charge. By contrast, the public favored a Democratic Congress by a margin of 48 to 39 in April of last year. That’s quite a drop.

The report would be more persuasive if it included statistics and evidence that showed Republicans were also losing ground with the electorate as their Democratic counterparts implode. That’s not here. Instead, the NYT recruits Moody’s Analytics to help take the edge off troubling economic news that normally bites the incumbent party.

“The economic forecasting company also predicts housing prices will rise in metropolitan areas connected to a fifth of the competitive House seats identified by The Times,” the report says. “The forecasters project three-quarters of the competitive districts will experience employment growth in their corresponding metropolitan areas between the fourth quarter of 2009 and the fourth quarter of 2010.”

Republicans still have a long distance to travel before voters are convinced they are serious about downsizing government and restoring constitutionalism. But there is no denying how much political trouble the Democrats are now in less than two years after the liberal media suggested Republicans would be consigned to the political wilderness for decades.

Anytime someone argues for more freedom and less intrusion in the marketplace they are inviting negative press coverage. After organizing public relations efforts against left-leaning groups it’s not surprising to find that Richard Berman’s non-profit groups have come under media scrutiny and that’s fair enough. But why do ACORN’s non-profits continue to get a free pass? After all, the IRS has already dismissed complaints against Berman.

Questions are being raised in The New York Times about the relationship between Richard Berman’s for-profit communications firm and the six non-profit firms he founded. The Washington D.C. lobbyist, turned policy advocate, has used the non-profits to help organize against policies that intrude on the free market and interfere with consumer choice. But his critics insist that the non-profits are actually money-makers for Berman and Company, the communications firm.

Organizations such as The Humane Society and Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) that are unaccustomed to playing defense have suddenly been forced into a position where they are forced to account for the economic and social costs of interventionist policies thanks to Berman’s efforts.  Reporter Stephanie Strom does a nice job of explaining some of the history and provides ample room for a company spokeswoman to address the chief complaints.

But it is worth noting that Strom is the same reporter who wrote about the ACORN organization in the months leading up to the 2008 presidential election. Her investigation was shut down when Anita MonCrief, the anonymous source Strom had been using, revealed that the Obama Presidential Campaign had sent its maxed out donor list to the Washington D.C. ACORN office. The relationship between Strom and  MonCrief, a former Project Vote/ACORN employee, is described here in a previous TimesCheck posting.   

The front page report on Berman, his media campaigns and non-profit groups raise legitimate questions but they should also be applied with equal force against ACORN, which has been the subject of congressional investigations and voter registration fraud allegations. While it is quite evident that Times makes every effort here to discredit Berman, it is ultimately forced to concede that there is no evidence of any federal violations.

After auditing the Center for Consumer Freedom and the Employment Policies Institute, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) could find no violations and exonerated Berman, the NYT acknowledges.

The same cannot be said of ACORN.

Cleta Mitchell, co-chair of the Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA), has identified numerous violations of federal law involving ACORN’s non-profit organizations based on testimony MonCrief delivered under oath. So is why is this is not a subject for further investigation?

“Project Vote should be investigated and audited by the IRS to ascertain whether Project Vote should be allowed to maintain its 501(c)(3) tax exempt status, based on the apparent misappropriation of charitable contributions for impermissible purposes,” Mitchell concluded in her analysis.

In her reporting, Strom goes into detail about some of the campaigns Berman has organized against groups that typically curry favor with the liberal news media.

She reports as follows:

“Across two decades, Mr. Berman has founded the Center for Consumer Freedom and five other nonprofits with similarly innocuous names. His industry donors — including restaurant chains whose costs could rise if living conditions for animals have to be improved, and wine and spirits companies that might sell less liquor if MADD has its way — can claim a deduction for charitable donations or business expenses. And since nonprofit groups do not have to disclose their donors, Mr. Berman’s groups offer an even more valuable asset — anonymity for companies that would rather their customers not know they are behind certain attacks.”

Strom continues:

“His critics say Mr. Berman’s organizations are little more than moneymakers for his for-profit communications firm, Berman and Company. Last month, in what appears to be a new tactic by those critics, the Humane Society and MADD filed a complaint with the New York Commission on Public Integrity, charging that the American Beverage Institute and Berman and Company were in fact lobbying and had failed to register with the state as lobbyists.

Sarah Longwell, a spokeswoman for Berman and Company and several of its nonprofits, called the filing `a harassment P.R. strategy, pure and simple.’

‘These complaints are the desperate acts of groups who can’t respond to the substance of our criticisms,’ Ms. Longwell said.”

As it turns out, the community organizers formerly  known as ACORN also benefit from anonymous donors.

“Anyone who celebrates the demise of ACORN has celebrated prematurely because they are not going away,” MonCrief said in an interview. “The network is repositioning itself so it can receive new donations.”

ACORN, which stands for the Association of Community Activists for Reform Now, has received over $53 million in federal funds since 1994, federal records show. Although the U.S. Supreme Court turned away a legal challenge to last year’s congressional ban on public funding, there does not appear to be any concerted effort on the part of lawmakers to have it re-imposed.

MonCrief indentified Wellspring Advisors, Vanguard Charitable Endowment, the Rockefeller Fund and the Tides Foundation as the major conduits for facilitating anonymous donations.

“If someone wanted to contribute directly to ACORN without having their name attached to it they could give a  check to Wellspring Advisors, they can give to Vanguard Charitable Endowment, they can give to Tides Foundation,” she said. “There are so many ways ACORN can obtain money through these anonymous donors  and some are connected to the Rockefeller  Fund.  So long as there is an agenda they are going to make sure that money is funneled to them anyway they can.”

Strom, who has done some excellent investigative pieces, should consider reactivating her old source. Her front page report raises some interesting questions about how the tax code can be used to complicate disclosure.

For example, Roger Colinvaux, a law professor at Catholic University in Washington is quoted here and suggests that the anonymity of the donors makes it hard to determine whether Mr. Berman was really representing industries. Berman in turn says that his non-profits provide the public with great educational services “and are thus no different from the organizations his groups attack.”

Since Berman has been exonerated from any wrongdoing by the IRS, the NYT should shift its focus back in the direction of ACORN, which has been called out by its own members for financial misappropriation. The House Oversight Committee has already published two very detailed reports about the organization’s shady operations that can serve as the basis for new reports.

With the political class using the oil spill has cover for costly schemes that have no relevance to America’s energy needs, the fourth-estate has thus far failed to ask policymakers how new regulations will help resolve the current crisis and alleviate future challenges.

What is the connection between the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster and the stated need for anti-emissions regulations and higher energy prices? This question goes unexplored in the front page coverage the New York Times devoted to President Obama’s address to the nation earlier this week.

Obama has called for a renewed commitment to “clean energy” policies that would de-emphasize fossil fuels and reduce oil dependence. He has also imposed a six-month moratorium on deep water offshore drilling.

“Today, as we look to the gulf, we see an entire way of life being threatened by a menacing cloud of black crude,” Obama said in his speech. “We cannot consign our children to this future. The tragedy on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace clean energy future is now.”

In his coverage, The Times does an effective job of hitting on some of the highlights. The report, for example, discusses the president’s “adversarial tone” toward BP officials at some length and touches on regulatory failures evident within the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service.

However, the relevance of a “cap and trade” bill to the environmental challenges that now beset the Gulf of Mexico is debatable. Moreover, as TimesCheck has previously reported, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who has supported earlier versions of the legislation, now concedes that regulatory schemes have no connection with climate change.

Even so, Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) have discussed the possibility of folding the Senate’s response to the Gulf of Mexico disaster with a plan that would price carbon. The idea here would be to portray the legislation less as a tax and more as a vote against oil companies.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has delivered its economic modeling results to Kerry and Lieberman for the “cap and trade” bill they introduced in May that shows the bill will have minimal long-term costs for Americans; a claim that does not pass the laugh test. The Heritage Foundation has released an analysis of the EPA’s methodology that questions agency’s “generous assumptions” and its use of discounting.

“Discounting is a legitimate tool in finance and for cost-benefit calculations,” the Heritage analysis explains. “But discounting can give a much distorted view of costs, as is done by those misrepresenting the EPA analysis.”

“Even the most generous scenario in this EPA report shows that costs will be forced on the economy—higher energy prices and lost income,” Heritage points out. “…Regardless of whether the lower cost estimates are true, this bill provides negligible environmental benefit. Global temperature reduction from Kerry-Lieberman would be .077 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050 and 0.200 degrees by 2100. And despite the best attempt for politicians to marry the Gulf oil spill and cap and trade legislation, even the EPA analysis shows cap and trade will do very little to cut petroleum use.”

Despite Obama’s renewed commitment to “cap and trade” he appears to be short in the Senate.

“I don’t think Senator Kerry has 60 votes,” Mark Helmke, a top aide to Sen. Richard Luger (R-Ind.) has been quoted as saying. Luger has offered up his own energy bill, which does not include emissions caps. But where is legislation that would help to unleash America’s natural resources and the creative energy of free people?

The problem with Obama’s speech is that it was mostly filled with non-sequiturs unattached to challenges of the BP oil spill and America’s energy needs. The president has often cited Spain as model for the clean energy economy of the future. But here again, facts and economic realities intrude. Gabriel Calzada, an economics professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Spain, has produced a new study that shows green jobs are mostly temporary, heavily subsidized and subtract away from economic performance.

Remarkably, a “news analysis” piece that accompanies the front page report does touch on the irrelevance of the president’s proposals. The commentary here is as follows:

“The connection to the spill, of course, only goes so far.While he called for more wind turbines and solar panels, for instance, neither fills gasoline tanks in cars and trucks, and so their expansion would not particularly reduce the need for the sort of deepwater drilling that resulted in the spill.”

Several trade groups including the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association have released some telling statistics that should also find their way into future reports as the political class continues to pursue costly, counterproductive and irrelevant policies with aclarity.

They are as follows:

*  Gulf production represents 27% of the US oil and 15% of US natural gas production.

* Deepwater production represents more than 70% of total Gulf of Mexico production, so the moratorium will ultimately make us more dependent on foreign sources which don’t share our environmental standards. The oil will arrive via pipelines or on tankers, which are also at risk for spills. America will lose tens of thousands of jobs.

* The offshore drilling industry is responsible for 200,000 jobs in the Gulf region.

* The moratorium could cost 3,000 to 6,000 Louisiana jobs in the next two to three weeks alone, and potentially 10,000 in the coming months. To put that in context, the entire U.S. economy created only 41,000 new private jobs in May, according to the Louisiana Department of Economic Development.

* For each of the 33 Louisiana platforms idled by the work stoppage, up to 1,400 jobs and potentially $330 million in lost wages per month are at risk.

* The moratorium will cost the federal government approximately $120 to $150 million in lost royalty payments in 2011, and $300 to $500 million in lost corporate taxes, according to Consultants Wood Mackenzie.

* Since 1947, oil companies have drilled more than 42,000 wells in the Gulf. Current production is about 1.6 million barrels a day, and four-fifths of that is from deep water. Yet in a typical year, spills equal only several hundred barrels, according to the American Petroleum Institute.

* Nearly 60% of today’s 7,300 active Gulf leases are in deep water, including the 20 highest-producing leases in the Gulf.

* According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), a moratorium in the Gulf puts 300,000 barrels a day at risk.  That’s 300,000 barrels a day that will now need to be imported from foreign sources, sending revenue and jobs overseas and raising its own safety issues.

With public attention now turned onto the late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s just released FBI file, now would be an appropriate moment to investigate his confidential correspondence with the KGB, which is well-documented, but under-reported. Paul Kengor, a Grove City College professor, has preserved documents that have now been resealed in Moscow. He is an excellent source and a good starting point for the NYT and others…

Senator Edward M. Kennedy offered to work in close concert with high level Soviet officials to sabotage President Ronald Reagan’s re-election efforts and to arrange for congenial American press coverage of General Secretary Yuri Andropov, according to a 1983 KGB document.

Specifically, Kennedy offered to have “representatives of the largest television companies in the U.S. contact Y.V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interview.” The idea here would be for the Soviet leader to make an end run around Reagan and make a direct appeal to the American people.

Kennedy suggested that Walter Cronkite, Barbara Walters and Elton Raul, the president of the board of directors for ABC, be considered for the interviews with Andropov in Moscow. He also asked the KGB to consider having “lower level Soviet officials, particularly the military” take part in television interviews inside the U.S. where they could convey peaceful intentions.

The confidential correspondence between Sen. Kennedy and Soviet agents first came to light in a Feb. 2, 1992 report published in the London Times entitled “Teddy, the KGB and the Top Secret File. Paul Kengor, a Grove City College political science professor, included the document in his 2006 book: “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and The Fall of Communism.”

However, the material has received a paucity of media attention even after Kennedy’s death last year and Monday’s release of his FBI files. Kennedy’s long history of secret overtures to the Soviets at the expense of his own president deserves further exploration as they could provide additional insight into the final, pivotal years of the Cold War.

The KGB document in question includes a letter dated May 14, 1983 from KGB head Viktor Chebrikov addressed to Andropov. Former Senator John Tunney (D-Calif.) traveled to Moscow in May of that year on behalf of Kennedy where he outlined a potential collaborative scheme aimed against Reagan, the KGB letter says.

In the interest of world peace and improved American-Soviet relations, Kennedy offers specific proposals built around a public relations effort designed to “counter the militaristic politics of Reagan and his campaign to psychologically burden the American people,” Chebrikov wrote.

Although it is not made clear who Tunney actually met with in Moscow, the letter does say that Sen. Kennedy directed the California Democrat to reach out to “confidential contacts” so Andropov could be alerted to the senator’s proposals.

“Tunney told his contacts that Kennedy was very troubled about the decline in U.S -Soviet relations under Reagan,” Kengor the Grove City professor said in an interview. “But Kennedy attributed this decline to Reagan, not to the Soviets. In one of the most striking parts of this letter, Kennedy is said to be very impressed with Andropov and other Soviet leaders.”

In Kennedy’s view, the main reason for the antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1980s was Reagan’s unwillingness to yield on plans to deploy middle-range nuclear missiles in Western Europe, the KGB chief observed in his letter.

“Kennedy was afraid that Reagan was leading the world into a nuclear war,” Kengor said. “He hoped to counter Reagan’s policies, and by extension hurt his re-election prospects.”

Tunney also discussed Kennedy’s presidential ambitions with the Soviet contacts, according to the letter. Kennedy was looking to run in 1988 when he would be remarried and his “personal problems” resolved. However, the letter also said he did not rule out 1984.

Kennedy also offered to travel to Moscow with Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-Ore.) to meet with Andropov. Both senators favored a freeze on the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

“There’s a lot more here that needs to found,” Kengor continued. “This was a shocking revelation.”

Tunney has previously acknowledged his role as an intermediary not just for Kennedy for but other U.S senators. There’s an opening here for enterprising reporting in the New York Times and other media outlets that have so far ignored the story. It is worth noting that Tunney told the London Times he made 15 separate trips to Moscow.

An investigative piece might begin by asking which other U.S. senators were involved in correspondence which could be in violation of an obscure law dating back to the time of the early American Republic called the Logan Act, which prohibits U.S. citizens  from “directly or indirectly commenc[ing] or carr[ying] on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States.”

The 2,352 pages covering the period of 1961 through 1985 included in Kennedy’s FBI file have enabled the Times and others to supply readers with rich, detailed reports. The following nugget from the Gray Lady’s Monday edition gives good cause to keep reading:

“They [the FBI files] document the keen interest the bureau took when Mr. Kennedy met with “ ‘intellectuals’ of leftist tinge” on a visit to Mexico in 1961; the relationship the Kennedy family had with J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the F.B.I.; and the efforts of the Nixon administration to find out more about the 1969 Chappaquiddick accident, in which a young woman drowned after a car being driven by Mr. Kennedy plummeted off a bridge near Martha’s Vineyard.”

So why not delve more into a KGB document that has been preserved by Professor Kengor and others in anticipation of Russian government figures resealing those same files?

In his blog appearing on the American Thinker, Kengor details his many media frustrations.

“In 2006, when my book was released, there was a virtual media blackout on coverage of the document, with the exception of conservative media: talk-radio, Rush Limbaugh, some websites, and mention on FoxNews by Brit Hume,” he wrote. “Amazingly, I didn’t even get calls from mainstream reporters seeking to shoot down the story. I had prepared in great detail to be grilled on national television, picturing the likes of Katie Couric needling me. I didn’t need to worry.”

There is no escaping the “blame America first” mentality at work in Kennedy’s correspondence that omits and discussion of Soviet aggression in Europe and belligerence toward the U.S.

“Senator Kennedy, like other rational people, is very troubled by the current state of Soviet-American relations,” Chebrikov observes. “Events are developing such that this relationship coupled with the general state of global affairs will make the situation even more dangerous. The main reason for this is Reagan’s belligerence, and his firm commitment to deploy new American middle range nuclear weapons within Western Europe. According to Kennedy, the current threat is due to the president’s refusal to engage in any modification of  his policies.”

According to the New York Times opinion page (and more often than what passed for objective reporting) Reagan was also a threat to world stability. With the Berlin Wall demolished, enslaved nations set free and the capitalist system vindicated, the NYT and other media organizations that long sought to discredit the anti-communist cause ought to consider probing into perfidious exercises operating at odds with American interests.

They’re not giving up on more government control of the private sector through “cap and trade” legislation. This much can be derived from recent news coverage.  Remarkably, Sen. Lindsey Graham admits that “energy” legislation has nothing to do with the environment; a crucial point that goes missing in coverage.

President Obama is using the Deepwater Horizon oil spill as a new rationale for energy legislation that has been stalled on Capitol Hill. The New York Times comes oh, so close to properly informing its readership of the sincere motivations standing behind “cap and trade” schemes in one of its latest reports.

Unfortunately, the newspaper’s enthusiasm for statist policies precludes from asking the right questions where the sleight of hand at work in Washington D.C. is actually quite evident.

The key player here in Sen. Lindsey Graham as he has been working in close concert with Democratic colleagues and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.).  TimesCheck has noted in the past how Graham became the new Republican liberal media darling in light of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) rightward shift. Graham withdrew his support for a repacked “cap and trade” bill after Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) suggested that climate change would take a back seat to immigration.

Until the actual causes of the BP oil spill are exposed and understood, he remains reluctant to reactive “cap and trade” in total but has expressed support for a water down energy bill sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman. The Times reports as follows:

“Mr. Graham said that until the causes of the BP oil spill were identified and addressed, he would not vote for any sweeping climate change legislation. Instead, he endorsed a bill introduced last week by Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, that sets higher fuel economy standards for cars, provides incentives for the development of alternative fuels and imposes stricter efficiency standards on buildings. The Lugar proposal includes no cap on carbon emissions but would seek to reduce greenhouse gas pollution through energy-saving steps.

`I’m not going to take a vote on the floor without a rational policy because we’re in the middle of a major oil spill,” Mr. Graham said. “I’m not going to put that on the table until I find out what happened in the gulf and make sure it doesn’t happen again.’

Mr. Lieberman said the oil spill made it more urgent to enact comprehensive energy and climate change legislation. He acknowledged, however, that the measure he and Mr. Kerry sponsored lacked the votes it needs and would probably be carved up and served in combination with other bills like Mr. Lugar’s.”

But the most important quote from Sen. Graham that deserves mention is left out of the equation. When he asked about his support for an earlier bill the Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Lieberman had co-sponsored, Graham made the following admission:

“It’s not a global warming bill to me,” he said. “Because global warming as a reason to pass legislation doesn’t exist anymore.” He also explained: “There is no bipartisan support for a cap-and-trade bill based on global warming.”

In other words, the overarching purpose here is government control and government regulation as opposed to environmental edification. That’s big news but the point is lost on the liberal news media, which sympathizes with government takeovers of the private sector.

The public should know that the political class was merely using global warming as a duplicitous and misleading rationale to distract away from expensive and intrusive policies. But the tone and direction of the Times report suggests that policymakers maintain noble objectives.

“Images of gushing oil and dying pelicans in the Gulf of Mexico have stirred anger and agony in Washington,” the report says. “But are they enough to prod the Senate to act on long-delayed clean energy and climate change legislation?

“Energy, maybe,” the report continues. “Climate, probably not. There is growing sentiment for a measure that penalizes BP, imposes higher costs and tougher regulations on offshore drillers and takes some steps toward reducing overall energy and petroleum consumption.”

No matter what the rationale, the political class is determined to subtract away from private enterprise and  to further burden America’s already beleaguered taxpayers. That’s the story.

Greece is auditioning for a bailout from other European Union states after running up its debt. The New York Times would have readers believe that tax cheats are the central problem here. But extravagant government benefits and entrenched union interests drive spending programs beyond the point where they are sustainable, nevermind how much tax revenue is collected. This point goes missing in the coverage…

Greece is a socialist state bedeviled by unsustainable pensions, mounting debt and a lethargic population. In many respects, it serves as a metaphor for where the U.S. may be heading in light of how powerful public employee unions have become. This front page piece in The New York is instructive because it fixes the blame on insufficient tax revenue as opposed to government spending; there’s an agenda here.

The Tea Party movement suggests that America may yet find  her way again, which is why big government failures must be explained away in the liberal news media where there are most prevalent. Throughout the European Union, wages and taxes are high, regulations burdensome and the unions firmly entrenched. Former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao has warned against “The Europeanization of the American economy” in the form interventionist government policies that converge with disconcerting economic trends.

The U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), for instance, has released some unsettling numbers that point to severe public policy challenges: 52 percent of all union members work for the federal or state and local governments, a sharp increase from the 49 percent in 2008.A majority of American union members are now employed by the government; three times more union members now work in the Post Office than in the auto industry. This means union workers have a vested interest in higher taxes and government expansion.

Although EU member states are required to keep their deficit constrained at 3 percent of GDP, Greece has already hit over 12 percent and will need to issue almost $80 million in government bonds to finance the debt, according to government figures. U.S. taxpayers who rightly balk at the bailout measures that have been floated since the end of 2008 ought to examine the rescue package that have been floated in the EU. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is trying to sell the public (with a little help from a compliant NYT) on a $30 billion bailout for Greece.

Meanwhile, The Times is trying to sell the American people on the perfidy of taxpayers. This most recent article goes into great detail about Greek citizens who decline to acknowledge that own pools on their tax forms. It is a clever, cheeky piece that deliberately sidesteps the public policy failures responsible for the country’s collapsing economy. Only 324 residents admitted to having pools in the northern suburb area in question when satellite photos show there was almost 17,000 pools.

“Such evasion has played a significant role in Greece’s debt crisis, and as the country struggles to get its financial house in order, it is going after tax cheats as never before,” The Times argues.

Various studies, including one by the Federation of Greek Industries last year, have estimated that the government may be losing as much as $30 billion a year to tax evasion — a figure that would have gone a long way to solving its debt problems.”

But there is a big missing piece of the equation here. Even if the efforts are successful, the additional tax dollars will only be used to subsidize the very spending habits that have pushed Greece to brink.

The article concludes with a dig against the most industrious elements of society without any mention of the bloated welfare state that could cost neighboring countries in the EU a pretty penny.

“Some of the most aggressive tax evaders, experts say, are the self-employed, a huge pool of people in this country of small businesses,” according to The Times. “It includes not just taxi drivers, restaurant owners and electricians, but engineers, architects, lawyers and doctors.”